Claire Pamment and Hesam Sharifian guest editors The necessity to facilitate scholarship on Theatre and Performance in Muslim Worlds has never felt stronger than today. The dominant political discourse, the fringe ideological pseudo-thoughts, and the omnipresent Islamophobia of the west, it seems, have all converged in a pivotal historical moment—a historical moment that marks Donald
Issue 11.2
Issue 11.1
David V. Mason The submission did not jump to the top of the priorities list. In fact, I regret to say that I did not look at the submission itself right away. I set the email aside for later consideration, whenever I had some time. And we all know how often that happens. When I
Issue 10.2
David V. Mason More change. You’ll notice that we’ve moved to Chicago. It’s a choice that has form as well as function in mind. The function, we hope, will improve on the way that the MLA style that the journal has followed for years provides necessary information. Form, we think, is not irrelevant, and it
Issue 10.1
David V. Mason This issue of Ecumenica is the first to go to press without Carolyn Roark’s imprimatur. Carolyn Roark started The Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance in 2003. That journal became Ecumenica in 2008. Carolyn edited the journal under both titles until 2016, and remained with the journal in an administrative role until 2017.
Volume 9.1-2
David V. Mason I’d like to write about something else, but it would be irresponsible. More than one hundred and twenty million citizens of the United States of America went to the polls in early November, 2016, to elect a new President. Probably not a single one of these people anticipated the outcome. For many
Volume 6.2
Ecumenica celebrated a major milestone in our organizational life in 2013: we were officially granted our 501c3 Non-profit Organization designation. This has been the result of countless hours of work by the volunteer staff of the journal, as well as outside friends and supporters, all of whom gave time and attention for a neverending series of meetings, epic paper shuffling, form filling, form filing, and proofreading. Our collective sigh of relief was such that it may have contributed to fall's blustery weather.
Volume 6.1
Carolyn Roark In recent weeks, I was reading an essay by Larry Alex Taunton—it was on the subject of young atheists and the need for Christian communities to deal more thoughtfully and respectfully with their philosophy of unbelief— and I was struck by an off-hand remark about self-declared “militant” atheists like Richard Dawkins. I suddenly
Volume 5.2
Carolyn Roark The events of the current US election cycle leave me feeling almost as if it is unnecessary to write an introduction to this volume. The parties and candidates have already done plenty to demonstrate that politics is theatre. There is a true sense of watching a high stakes drama unfold, with high tech
Volume 5.1
Carolyn Roark In his Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson offers a “Happy Thought”: The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. One of my happiest thoughts as editor of Ecumenica is the pleasure of seeking everything I can find in the
Volume 4.2
Carolyn Roark In early November, I visited Trinity University in order to attend their annual DeCourcey lecture, a much- anticipated evening with Salman Rushdie. He was in good form—funny, insightful, mischievous. He alternated his musings on freedom and responsibility in the writing profession with entertaining anecdotes about his own experiences, charting the evolution of his